"Death Comes Too Late': My Washington Times On Crime Column on Charles Ardai's Short Crime Story Collection

The Washington Times published my On Crime column on Charles Ardai’s collection of short crime stories, Death Comes Too Late.

You can read the column via the link below or the below text:

'Death Comes Too Late,' A collection of 20 crime short stories - Washington Times

I love short stories. Ernest Hemingway was a great novelist, but I believe his short stories, especially “The Killers,” “Fifty Grand” and “The Battler,” are more powerful than his novels. To use a simile I believed he would have liked, his short stories are like a short right knockout punch.

I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and his other fine novels, but I truly love his short stories about Pat Hobby, a hack Hollywood screenwriter. I love Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” and his other classic crime novels, but I am truly fond of his short stories that appeared in The Black Mask magazine before he became a novelist. 

And of course, I’m fond of the great short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry and W. Somerset Maugham, to name a few. Influenced by all these writers, my own crime short stories have appeared in online crime magazines over the years. (You can read my short crime stories at Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction Stories )

 

Another short story writer I’ve come to enjoy is Charles Ardai (seen in the above photo), the author of “Death Comes Too Late.” Mr. Ardai, the founder and publisher of Hard Case Crime, offers 20 crime stories in the collection, including “The Home Front,” which won him an Edgar Award.

 

I like his short story “Nobody Wins,” a Shamus Award finalist, about a mob enforcer who hires a private detective to find his lost love. I also like “The Shadow Line,” another private detective story.

I reached out to Mr. Ardai and asked him whether he had a favorite story in his collection.

 

“I’ll tell you what my answer should be, and then I’ll tell what my favorite is,” Mr. Ardai replied. “My answer should be ‘The Home Front’ because I won the Edgar Award for best short story. However, my secret favorite is ‘The Shadow Line’ because I love Raymond Chandler so much. I set out to write like Chandler, and I was praying that I could come up with one or two good lines.”

 

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

 

“Yes. When I was 10, there was a kids’ page in the New York Daily News, and they provided you with $10, but they only bought one from me. That was my first published piece. I wanted to be a writer desperately, but no magazine would publish a teenage writer, except that this was in the early ’80s when Atari came out with games, and suddenly magazines were reviewing video games, and no self-respecting adult writer wanted to write about Atari. So, I went to these magazines and said I’m 13 years old and can I write about these things. Some of them let me do it, so that’s how I got started as a writer. They gave me a free game and 50 bucks. I wrote my first short story for Ellery Queen magazine, and I wrote a few stories for Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock magazines, and I actually got a job working for the publisher of Ellery Queen and Hitchcock when I was 16 or 17 years old. That’s how I started writing short stories and editing collections of short stories, which is why “Death Comes Too Late” is such a throwback for me. I love short stories, and I love returning to those early days of my career.”

 

How did you begin publishing Hard Case Crime?

 

“I quit writing for a while, and I worked for companies, and I also started a couple of companies. But then in 2001, after I’ve been out of publishing for a while, the company I started was sold to a competitor. Afterwards, I was sitting with my friend Max Phillips, and we were talking about what we wanted to do. We said we missed those old pulpy, sexy and lurid paperback covers, and we asked why no one did that anymore. Then we said, hey, you know what? Why don’t we do it? We didn’t think it was going to work, yet about 20 years later, it’s still going. Believe me, we didn’t get rich doing it. But I love doing it. I love having all these books on my shelf that I created and gave to readers. Readers came back to me and said, hey, I remember books like this growing up. I loved those books, and I’m so glad you’re doing books like this again.”

I’m certain those readers will also find the short stories in “Death Comes Too Late” entertaining. And like me, they will love the book’s pulpy cover.

 

• Paul Davis’ “On Crime” column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

 

Death Comes Too Late

Charles Ardai

Hard Case Crime, $18.99, 400 pages

Two Of The Best Crime Short Stories Ever Written: My Washington Times On Crime Column On A Fine Collection of Hemingway’s Novels. Short Stories and Letters

The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on a collection of Ernest Hemingway’s novels, short stories and letters.

 

You can read the column via the link below or the text below:

A fine collection of Hemingway's novels, short stories and letters - Washington Times

 

 I’ve been an Ernest Hemingway aficionado since my teens, so I was pleased to read the Library of America’s collection of the late, great writer’s stories, “Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms & Other Writings 1927-1932.”

 

The Library of America, a nonprofit organization, champions our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s greatest writing in new editions. “No twentieth-century writer had a greater influence on American fiction than Ernest Hemingway,” The Library of America writes. “This volume, the second in Library of America’s definitive edition of Hemingway’s works, brings together Men Without Women, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, the three books that followed his groundbreaking debut novel, ’The Sun Also Rises,’ and solidified his status as a preeminent literary modernist.

 

“The appearance of “Men Without Women” (1927) confirmed Hemingway’s determination to leave his mark on the short story form. It comprises fourteen spare and unsparing stories about wounded soldiers, boxers, and bullfighters, each displaying the extraordinary economy of language that is the hallmark of his prose.”

 

While Hemingway is mostly known for writing about war, bullfighting, hunting and fishing, he also wrote what I believe are two of the best crime short stories ever written, “The Killers” and “Fifty Grand.” Both short stories, which are about boxers and crooks, are included in this collection.

 

The killers in “The Killers” are mob hit men who show up at a diner late one night where Hemingway’s autobiographical character, young Nick Adams, is working. He overhears the two hoodlums discussing their plans to murder the boxer.

Some years ago, I read “Ellery Queen’s Book of Mystery Stories.” The crime stories in this collection were written by writers who were not generally recognized as crime, mystery, or thriller writers.

Edited by Ellery Queen, the pseudonym of the writing team of Frederic Dannay and James Yaffe, and the name of their fictional detective character, the book offered crime stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and a dozen other writers. Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” is also included in the collection.

 

“Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” is one of the best-known short stories ever written, and no volume dedicated to the literature of crime would be complete without it,” the editors wrote in the introduction to the story. “It is revealing nothing new about Hemingway to point out that essentially, he is preoccupied with doom - more specifically, with death. It has been explained this way: ‘The I in Hemingway’s stories is the man that things are done to’ - and the final thing that is done to him, as to all of us, is death. No story of Hemingway illustrates this fundamental thesis more clearly than ’The Killers,’ nor does any story of Hemingway illustrate more clearly why he is a legend in his own lifetime. Here, in a few pages, is the justly famous Hemingway dialogue - terse, clipped, the quintessence of realistic speech; here in a few pages, are more than the foreshadowing of the great literary qualities to be found in ’A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.’”

 

In “Fifty Grand,” Hemingway’s story is about Jack Brennan, an over-the-hill fighter. Jack Brennan is visited at his training camp by two flashy men described as “wise guy” pool hall owners. The men, Steinfelt and Morgan, called “big operators,” want the boxer to throw the fight as they have big money on his opponent. Jack Brennan, who thinks he will lose the fight anyway, bets 50 grand on his opponent to win. 


Hemingway, a noted amateur boxer, was a huge boxing fan. He knew the sport and the parasitic crooks who clung to the fighters like remoras to sharks.

 

A good companion to the Library of America’s Hemingway book is the Cambridge University Press’s “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway 1934-1936.”

 

In her introduction to the volume, Dr. Verna Kale, associate editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, wrote, “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 6 (1934–1936) is a book about fish. It is about other things as well, of course: writing and art, friendship and fatherhood, the ongoing Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism in Europe. And fish — so many fish.”

 

The Hemingway letters cover the publication of Hemingway’s experimental nonfiction book “Green Hills of Africa” and his work on short stories, his twenty-plus pieces in Esquire magazine and his view of other writers.

 

Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms & Other writings. 1927-1932
Edited by Robert W. Trogdon
Library of America, $32, 1037 pages

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway 1934-1936
Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale and Miriam B. Mandal
Cambridge University Press, $45, 700 pages